Activities: biodiversity and ecosystem services

Hint: the background information that will help you complete these activities is found in the video.

1. Choose a particular type of ecosystem, do some research on it online or at your library, and then create a list of all the different services that ecosystem provides to humans. Remember that services or benefits can be direct, providing items or products that humans use; they can be indirect, carrying out processes that benefit humans; and they can be aesthetic or ethical in their impact. Try to list several examples of each of these three categories of service.

2. Get a group of people together to play the roles of different stakeholders at a community debate to decide whether the local wetland area should be drained so that more farmland can be created. Stakeholders might include the owner of a machinery company that would help drain the wetland, a member of an endangered species protection group, an artist who paints pictures of the wetland, a representative of the local farmer’s market, an official from the municipal water plant, a medical researcher who is looking for new drugs to treat human diseases, and so on. Be creative and think of as many different stakeholders as possible. If you can’t gather a group of people to carry out the debate, you can write a list of the various stakeholders and what their main argument would be for or against draining the wetland to create more farmland.